Sasa Karanovic Posts

First, let’s see it in action

It’s a bit hard to capture how this clock really looks, especially since my camera doesn’t really appreciate when there are sixty LEDs glowing into it. Trust me, it looks even cooler when you see it live.

While ago I backed up a SPIDriver’s crowd supply campaign to make an open-source, open-hardware SPI tool. Even though I have plenty of professional tools to do this job, but at $30 it was worth buying this tool even if I never end up using it, right? Two weeks ago I received it in the mail and gave it a quick demo run; it looked great, worked as expected but I didn’t had a real chance to put it to the test. Last week there was an issue on the production line and few bricked units ended up on my table. Since I needed to extract data from the SPI Flash and analyze it, I though this was a perfect opportunity to put the SPIDriver to the test.

Making a IoT LED dimmer that you can control via your PC, phone, tablet or any other device connected to the network is super simple, and I’m going to show you how.

I’m sharing my three channel LED dimmer that you can use to dim single RGB LED strip or dim three separate LED channels. I want to be able to control lights above my desk and also mix warm white and cool white strip to give me more flexibility over lighting while I’m working, taking pictures or watching movies.

This is going to be a very short and very simple project that if you follow steps below, you can build it in an hour (excluding lead time for components).

This one is a very simple but cool project, something that I would recommend to anyone who is interested into DIY electronics, gadgets and learning new stuff in general. It is definitely one of those projects that don’t require too much time but you can learn a lot by making it and also earn a lot of credit by sharing it with your friends and family.

Below you can see a final product. It’s a heart shaped, touch sensitive, keychain for your loved ones. On the front side there is a smiley face drawing that has eyes and mouth. Eyes have two red LEDs that will start to pulse once you touch the keychain or place you finger on the smiley face (see it in action below)

Hello everyone! I have an exciting news to announce. As you may have noticed my blog has not been very up to date or had content published on regular basis. I am very sorry for that and I promise that going forward there will be regular content published here. Also I would like to give a HUGE THANK YOU to all of you who have visited my website on regular basis looking for new content. Thank you and a virtual high-five to all of you!

TL;DR: I am going to be making new projects and releasing new and interesting content on a regular basis!

Theory behind this project

Another weekend project that I’ve been working on is Wake-up light. Lately I’ve been doing more research on sleep phases and how to “hack” your brain to wake-up more refreshed and adjust your sleep cycle. There are many studies out there explaining this and providing scientific evidence, so if this is something you are interested in, I encourage you to go and get more detailed information on this subject. However I won’t go into too much detail, I’ll just try to give very simple explanation: When you sleep, you are either in REM or deep sleep (NREM) phase. When you wake up in REM phase you feel fresh, relaxed and full of energy. When you are woken up during the deep sleep phase, you feel like you’ve just been hit by a bus, and you take long time to actually wake up.

These PCB-s are a part of much bigger project that I am currently working on and I have been waiting for them waaaay too long. Boards are designed to house two I2C sensors, (almost any I2C sensor breakout board can fit onto dedicated headers), at the moment I am using Temperature+Humidity sensors, Pressure Sensors, Ambient Light sensors and few others on these boards. Also I am using PIC16F1829 microcontroller to do all the “magic” and nRF24L01+ for communication with the main unit that does storage, data analysis and communication with other parts of the project.

I kept getting more and more emails from people asking me if I could modify the firmware of the Bedroom clock I made last year to implement an easier way to adjust the time/date, so that’s what I did. In Firmware v2 H and M buttons have the following functions: H : This button will cycle selection trough hour, min,…

USB Power supply Active Load Tester or short PAL Tester is unit designed for testing the quality of the power supplies.
Idea was to create low-cost, precise device for simultaneous measurement of Voltage and Current drawn from the device under test. This is one of my weekend projects that I have decided to release to the public. All source files can be found on projects GitHub page.

Device Features:

Open Source and Open Hardware

Modular design, easy to understand and change/adapt to your needs

Uses widely available and off-the shelf components

Components Bill of Material is below $10

Integrated USB-to-Serial converter for easier interface with the device

Hello!

My name is Saša Karanović and I am an electronics engineer from Toronto, Canada. Electronics engineering is my passion and I enjoy designing Hardware and Firmware for all kinds of projects. If you have interesting idea or need help with your project, let me know and I will be happy to help you.